Big Education Ape

Saturday, July 22, 2017

ESSA Gives Black Parents Tools to Hold Schools Accountable | BlackPressUSA

ESSA Gives Black Parents Tools to Hold Schools Accountable | BlackPressUSA:

ESSA Gives Black Parents Tools to Hold Schools Accountable

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Image result for naacp charter school moratorium

By Lynette Monroe (Program Assistant, NNPA/ESSA Public Awareness Campaign)

Popular opinion, suggest that caregivers, educators, and students have an equal role to play in the academic achievement of students.

However, according to an annual survey of “Black and Latino Parents and Families on Education and Their Children’s Future” facilitated by the Leadership Conference Fund, Black and Latino parents do not feel that educators, or more specifically the system in which these educators operate within, are upholding their portion of responsibility to their children.

Everyone needs to be concerned about accountability and school performance, specifically for Black and Hispanic students.

In 2014, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projected that public school enrollment would decrease for White students in the United States; the decline in enrollment has resulted in a majority-minority public school system.

That means that national education laws must be culturally competent, taking into account the changing demographics of the public school system. Furthermore, although minorities account for the majority of students enrolled in public schools, our nation’s schools remain extremely segregated. In March 2016, “The Atlantic” reported that “in 90 of the largest 95 U.S. cities, more students of color than Whites attend school with mostly poor or low-income peers.”

Researchers at the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis found that the single-most powerful predictor of racial gaps in educational achievement is the extent to which students attend schools surrounded by other low-income students.

We have an obligation to advocate for accountability standards and to monitor school performance in a majority-minority public school system, where Black and Hispanic students disproportionately attend schools with low-income classmates.

One of the best ways parents, education advocates and community stakeholders can hold school officials accountable is by reviewing the “report card” in their local school district.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires that data for each student subgroup is reported, a requirement ESSA Gives Black Parents Tools to Hold Schools Accountable | BlackPressUSA:

Schools address gender inclusion to ensure all students can learn

Schools address gender inclusion to ensure all students can learn:

Schools address gender inclusion to ensure all students can learn

Eleven-year-old Liz Ondoma thinks talking babout gender equality in schools is important.

The Madison, Wis., fifth-grader took part in creative projects in Michele Hatchell’s art class that allowed her to express her views on equality. Her favorite was creating her own superhero with superpowers.

“I’m both genders in my superhero,” Ondoma says. The powers she chose were foiling racism and promoting equality for girls. Because Ondoma has experienced societal expectations for how both girls and boys are supposed to look, she gave her superhero messy hair to counter those notions. Messy hair breaks all the rules in a good way, she says. For Ondoma, all aspects of equality go hand-in-hand.

“We are the future generation,” she says. “If they are teaching us about (equality), we have a better chance of preventing the not-so-good stuff that’s in the world. If they teach us now, we have a better chance of stopping all that and being better role models in the future. The sooner, the better.”

Ondoma is one of thousands of students nationwide learning about gender equality in schools.

The lessons are infused into history, literature, art and social studies for K-12 students.

Because schools are supposed to serve all children, teachers say it only makes sense that they would talk about gender equality, race, class and sexual orientation in the classroom.

If children feel they aren’t safe or aren’t being treated fairly, or if they are preoccupied with being teased or bullied, they can’t focus on their schoolwork, according to Welcoming Schools, a project of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRCF), which advocates for the rights of LGBTQ individuals. Teachers say if they wait to talk about these issues, it could be too late for some kids. Teens grappling with these concerns face violence, higher dropout rates and greater risk, advocates add.

Many educators and organizations supporting inclusive lessons say gender expectations limit all people.

“I remind people that (this work) lifts up all students,” says Hatchell. “When parents question it, the response is, ‘Don’t you want your child to reach their full potential Schools address gender inclusion to ensure all students can learn:

School board race reveals chronic gaps in education politics coverage - Columbia Journalism Review

School board race reveals chronic gaps in education politics coverage - Columbia Journalism Review:

School board race reveals chronic gaps in education politics coverage

This story is co-published with The Grade, an independent effort to improve mainstream education coverage in partnership with PDK International.

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW IT if you live outside of Southern California, but the nation’s second-largest school district—Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD)—recently held a nasty and expensive school board election that culminated in the surprise defeat of a teachers union-backed board chairman and the election of two other board members that the unions had opposed.

The runoff was a generational showdown and a school reform litmus test, in which two Teach for America alumni—one a Boomer, one a Millennial—faced off. Incumbent board chairman Steve Zimmer was defeated by an untested challenger named Nick Melvoin by a whopping 14 percentage points. The national trade publication Education Week called it a “major upset.”

The race was the biggest education campaign since last fall’s $41 million charter school debate in Massachusetts, and the biggest education showdown since the Betsy DeVos confirmation fight earlier this year. When all was said and done, campaign spending totaled roughly $17 million—a record amount for a local school board election.

Yet the race and its surprise outcome were met with tepid coverage by national media outlets that didn’t seem interested in a race that was emblematic of national tensions within the Democratic party and the school reform movement.

“I don’t feel like there was anywhere near adequate coverage of what the race meant within the Democratic Party, the labor movement, or the state legislature,” says Zimmer, who left office at the end of June.

Local coverage, while plentiful, focused mostly on the eye-popping amounts of money being spent and on a single hot-button issue: support for charter schools. Only now, in the aftermath of the race, are some of the most intriguing issues—controversial changes made at some district schools, budget problems, and campaign strategy—being unearthed.

“What got lost in the [local] coverage, which was focused so much on charter schools, was that there was too little attention paid to other problems that the district faces,” says EdSource’s Louis Freedberg, whose outlet provided some coverage of the race. “I wouldn’t imagine many outside LA and our readers were following that race.”

This isn’t the only time in recent memory that education journalism has fallen down on the job of covering an important political contest. It’s a pattern that raises serious questions about whether education reporters are best suited to do the job on their own.

Disclosure: The Grade is supported in part by a grant from the Broad Foundation, which has also helped fund the Los Angeles Times’ education coverage.

LAUSD IS THE NATION’S largest district with an independent, elected school board. Board members oversee the education of 640,000 students and an annual budget of nearly $8 billion.

However, in the past decade, LAUSD has lost about 100,000 students, School board race reveals chronic gaps in education politics coverage - Columbia Journalism Review:

All Doctors Should Teach (Paula Cohen) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

All Doctors Should Teach (Paula Cohen) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

All Doctors Should Teach

(Paula Cohen)

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I have written often about the cluster of occupations that make up the “helping” professions: teaching, clinical medicine, nursing, therapy, and social work. These professionals help students, patients, and clients learn and become healthy. They are all teachers albeit in different settings.

Most important, these “teachers” in helping professions are totally dependent upon their students, patients, and clients to learn and get healthy. Regardless of the degree earned, annual income, and social status, these professionals cannot reach their goals without the cooperation, compliance, and involvement of those being helped.

Those who recognize this inherent dependency of professionals upon whom they serve have occasionally recommended that all physicians, nurses, therapists, and social workers become teachers before they enter the other helping professions. Here is one such recommendation for those seeking to become physicians.

Paula Marantz Cohen is dean of the Pennoni Honors College and distinguished professor of English at Drexel University and the author of Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs. This post appeared in The American Scholar, September 18, 2012

My daughter, Katherine Penziner, wrote the essay that follows in response to my last column. She is spending a few years teaching in Southwest Arkansas as part of the Teach for America program. She plans eventually to go to medical school.

Every aspiring doctor should be required to teach a year of high school science. First, there is nothing more grueling than standing up, day after day, in front of hormonal and angsty teenagers who are having trouble controlling their attitudes. The emotional toll teaching takes can be exhausting–a perfect training ground for the taxing years of medical school we premeds are always hearing about. Still, a good day of teaching makes you feel good about yourself, and your students.

But what makes teaching most valuable for an aspiring doctor are the All Doctors Should Teach (Paula Cohen) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

CURMUDGUCATION: How To Recruit Teachers

CURMUDGUCATION: How To Recruit Teachers:

How To Recruit Teachers

There isn't a teacher shortage. Not really. But there is a shortage of districts and states that are successfully attracting people to teach careers. If I can't get a dealer to sell me a Lexus for $1.98, that does not mean there is an automobile shortage. The "teacher shortage" is really a shortage of $1.98 teachers.

Something is wrong. Not only do we have a drastic drop in the number of proto-teachers in the pipeline, but the profile of the teacher pool is off. The teacher pool is overwhelmingly female and white. Males and minorities are not represented in the teaching force in numbers that remotely resemble the demographics of our student population.

So how do we get and keep the teachers that we need?

After all, it ought to be easy. No other profession gets to pitch itself to every single young person who could possibly pursue it. So what are we missing?

To understand how to recruit teachers, we just have to remember how the teachers we have found their way to the classroom. And the most important thing to remember is how they start.

It's not a deep, complicated thing. Almost every teacher in a classroom started out as a student in a classroom, and that student had two simple thoughts--

1) I kind of like it here in school.

2) I can see myself doing that teaching thing.

That's it. If we get a student to harbor those two thoughts in his teenaged cranium, we have CURMUDGUCATION: How To Recruit Teachers:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: DeVos in Twitter war with AFT

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: DeVos in Twitter war with AFT:

DeVos in Twitter war with AFT

Does this mean, no more school visits together with Randi and Betsy?

Jack Roskopp at Detroit Metro Times reports that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos "is taking a note from her boss by firing back at her critics on Twitter".

The AFT teacher's union sent out a tweet today saying "@BetsyDeVos says public $ should invest in indiv students. NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids." This prompted DeVos to tweet back at the union with a series of tweets that don't exactly add up.

AFT responds.

I admit, it's not much of a war. For those who have a hard time making any sense of this tweetspat, let me try and break it down. Under the direction of Betsy DeVos, the DOE has become little more than an engine for driving school privatization, religious fundamentalism, racism and gender discrimination. Trump's appointment of DeVos to oversee this country's public education system threatens a roll-back of every hard-won gain by the Civil Rights Movement in the past 70 years.

DeVos and her new OCR chief, Candice Jackson are waving the "civil rights" banner as a Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: DeVos in Twitter war with AFT:

Public Schools In Cooperation With Community Leaders And Parents Are The Answer, NOT Charter Schools by Shannon Ergun - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association: Public Schools In Cooperation With Community Leaders And Parents Are The Answer, NOT Charter Schools by Shannon Ergun:

Public Schools In Cooperation With Community Leaders And Parents Are The Answer, NOT Charter Schools

by Shannon Ergun

I have opposed charter schools for many years now. It started with it just feeling wrong to create a separate system touting to incubate innovation to better meet the needs of students when that was possible in the public school system. Tacoma has done a great job of finding ways to innovate. They still need to develop better systems to make the innovations broadly and easily accessible to all our students. However, I feel like we have people in leadership (through the union, the board, and administration) working to address this problem.

As I have read more and more on charter schools and their impact on local communities and on students, I have come to realize that my initial feeling is proving true over and over again. While initially the NAACP supported the idea of charter schools as incubators of innovation, they have since come out strongly against charter schools. You can read their resolution for a moratorium on charter schools and the reasons for it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../regarding-the-naacp...

The National Education Association came out against charter schools years ago as educators watched the impact they had on public schools. At the national representative assembly this month, the 9,000 delegates approved a policy statement regarding charter schools outlining under what circumstances they should be supported and when they should not be. Because states define charter schools in different ways, it was important to create a national policy Badass Teachers Association: Public Schools In Cooperation With Community Leaders And Parents Are The Answer, NOT Charter Schools by Shannon Ergun:

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Connecticut | Real Learning CT

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Connecticut | Real Learning CT:

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Connecticut

On July 19, 2017, the unelected, governor-appointed Connecticut State Board of Education approved 504 additional seats in state charter schools for next year, with 154 of those seats going to Capital Preparatory Harbor School in Bridgeport.

GO FIGURE:

Connecticut is in a budget crisis with every expense being monitored, yet new charter school seats, which cost the state $11,000 each, are being initiated. The cost will be more than $5.5 million.

PLUS

The new seats will cost the beleaguered and impoverished Bridgeport Public Schools money it cannot afford and will strip them of much needed resources. The Bridgeport Board of Education unanimously voted against the expansion plan because the cost of adding grades to Capital Prep Harbor School requires the Bridgeport Public Schools to pay additional costs for transportation and other services at an additional location.

PLUS

The expansion plan for Capital Prep Harbor School, approved by the State Board of Education in 2014, called for three grades to be added in 2017-2018, but Capital Prep Harbor School requested and was granted the expansion to six new grades, which increased the costs of services from Bridgeport Public Schools from $200,000 to $400,000 for 2017-2018.

PLUS

Capital Prep Harbor School does not serve the population of Bridgeport Something Is Rotten In The State Of Connecticut | Real Learning CT:

Latest News and Comment from Education

Saturday, July 22, 2017

ESSA Gives Black Parents Tools to Hold Schools Accountable | BlackPressUSA

Schools address gender inclusion to ensure all students can learn

School board race reveals chronic gaps in education politics coverage - Columbia Journalism Review

All Doctors Should Teach (Paula Cohen) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

CURMUDGUCATION: How To Recruit Teachers

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: DeVos in Twitter war with AFT

Public Schools In Cooperation With Community Leaders And Parents Are The Answer, NOT Charter Schools by Shannon Ergun - Badass Teachers Association

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Connecticut | Real Learning CT

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